Hy-phenators

Does anyone know how to solve the Last Name problem?

Lord knows we live in a patrilineal society. Our family name is passed down through the male line. Your last name is your father's father's father's father's name, on to infinity. Or at least for a long time.

People I affectionately refer to as "hyphenators" have come up with a partial solution. Mr. North and Miss South become Mr. & Mrs. North-South--or South-North. They may take away the Mr. and Mrs. titles, too, but that's a story for another day. The point is that they combine their last names into one. There is continuity with the past, and both sides of the family are appropriately represented in this new name. So far, so good.

Even further, women solve the problem of not having to give up their name in marriage. Now, I'm not entirely convinced that changing one's name in marriage is a bad thing, but it is problematic that only women are expected to do this. So hyphenating solves a lot of dilemmas. However, the cold truth is that this system isn't ending patrilinealism. The names are still the male names. The man brings his father's name to the marriage and the women also brings her father's name.

And then what happens to the kids? Do they use the hyphenated name? Or do all the boys get the father's last name and the girls get their mother's? It would be odd to group kids along gender lines like that. It wouldn't be healthy for boys to over-associate with their father and girls to their mother, but it's also not fair for them to get their daddy's name but not their mother's. But if you don't pick, you end up with a problem:

The hyphenators haven't give us much direction for the future. If the North-South's and the East-West's marry, are they the North-West's? Or are they the North-South-East-West's? It is unclear which direction they should go.

What happens when Joe North-South-East-West marries Jill Peanut-Walnut-Macadamia-Almond? It's so cumbersome, the analyst in me wants to simplify and call them the Compass-Nuts or something. That people and those people. It is a matter of grouping.

It is certainly fair to keep all the names, no question. But it is not long before this system becomes unwieldy and you end up with 216 names. You could just begin the system of hyphenation and pick an arbitrary point and continue forwrad. But as the names grow in length, there would have to be some kind of system to pick which names to keep. Do you pick the male names? Female? Draw a name out of a hat?

People in Spain actually hyphenate--sort of. They don't use a single surname like we do in America. People really do hyphenate and your official family name is as long as your family's memory can remember. Granted, you would only use your 32 surnames on a very rare occasion, such as the ceremony when you're installed as king. In most other cases, you would use 2 names. Yet, those 2 names are patrilinealy determined--one from your father's side and one from your mother, but both dominant names come through the male line. Your father's father's father's, etc. and your mother's father's father's father's, etc.

So how do you:
1. Maintain the tradition of family names
2. Avoid preference of one gender over another?

Each married couple could invent a new name. You could have a name for your particular incarnation of the nuclear family, but it would have no consistency over time and through generations. To me, this destroys the whole idea of a family name, and I would give serious pause before throwing out that tradition.

I'm somewhat partial to hyphenating. I've never thought of myself as Frank Lesko. I've more aptly thought of myself as Frank Lesko-Hricison-Burek-Yakubov. Those families are very alive to me. It is a little less true on my father's side, as most of those relatives are living in Europe and unknown to us, but the overall point is the same. Hyphenating gives voice to each of these. But each name is a misnomer of sorts. The people I call the Burek's are really the Burek-Jawarski's (I need to verify that name). Each name makes sense from my vantage point, as it is the name I've come to use for the particular group of people, but that particular people is also the product of several families coming together, each with their own names and lineage. Once I go back a couple of generations, I'm happy just using one name for each family group. And most outsiders are quite content to think of your family with only one name, as well.

Long last names are also giving more emphasis to an issue that may not be as important anymore. In the olden days, it was more relevant that a certain person was from the Carpenter-Tailor-Smith-Wesson clan. There were matters of inheritance and alliances that went along with that. The people you talk with will actually know each of those families and have a reference point. Nowadays, people move around so much from city to city it hardly matters. Outside of a small town, feudal land system, does it matter which clans you hail from?

Hyphenating may ironically make things simpler now that there are so many mixed families. Parents divorce and remarry, and with hyphenation everyone would know who comes from who without having to ask all the time. But isn't there something special about a family all coming together under one name? I do. But how do you decide on a name??

And yes, it's only a name, but we know names are important or we wouldn't be having this discussion.